On Sat, Aug 05, 2000 at 04:53:59AM -0400, Gerhard Poul wrote:
> > To summarize the bug: the logging behavior of the snmp package changed
> > when we switched from CMU SNMP to the UCD implementation.
> Yes, the user interface which might be used by many people of an
> essential remote monitoring tool changed without any notice by the
> system administrator. (and it is a bad thing to notice this one week
> later.)
There's a similar issue with ssh - the default changed from allowing
remote root logins to disallowing them.
> > Here's what I think:
> > 1. I agree the change from CMU to UCD snmp should have been better
> > documented. Perhaps the maintainer should have made it more obvious
> > by calling the UCD package "ucd-snmp", as he named the source package.
> There is no problem in changing something but it should be documented
> somewhere which interfaces change when you do "apt-get dist-upgrade".
Yup - this is what SSH did. There's a debconf warning (although that's
not 100% reliable for SSH since if it gets mailed then that's too late)
and I believe something's been added to the release notes explaining
what needs to be done to get back the old behaviour and/or avoid making
the change.
> please take a look at http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_34.html#SEC34 in
> the gnu coding standards. I think such a utility is barely needed by debian
> and maybe also other distributions. _user_ _visible_ changes are _worth_
> to be documented.
That link points to an explanation about the NEWS file. I'd say that
the relase notes fill that role for Debian. Somenone should probably
get in touch with whoever maintains them (Josip Rodin <joy@debian.org>
IIRC) and tell them about this. It's far too late in the day to get a
There should probably be a (more widely advertised?) BTS package to
use when there are things come up during development that need
documenting.
[BTW, could you please just say what you're talking about rather than
referring to exernal things without any indication as to what they are.
It'd make your message a lot clearer and help folks working offline.]
--
Mark Brown mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
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